[This article appeared in the Summer 1970 issue of The Business Journal, published by the College
of Business Administration at WichitaStateUniversity,
pp. 5-10.]

What the Businessman Should Know About the “New Left”

Dwight D. Murphey

At least a
partial apology would seem to be in order for the title of this essay.We cannot hope, certainly, to cover in a few
pages all that a businessman—or anyone else, for that matter—should know about
the New Left.The title reminds me
slightly of the audacious subtitle to H. G. Wells’ two volume Outline of History, by which we are
advised that the work sets forth “The Whole Story of Man.”

And yet I
am persuaded that it is well to attract the attention of businessmen to an
article about the New Left.Not only men
of business, but Americans generally, ought to know far more than they do about
it, its origins and significance.

The entire
subject may be approached through a single question: What is the New Left?

The answer
must be made on at least two levels.First,
we will need to become aware of what the major “new leftists” have been doing
and saying.And then we will want to
seek a deeper explanation rooted in philosophy, sociology and history.

1.If we look at its leading proponents, we see
that the New Left is not monolithic; it has not yet arrived at a single
viewpoint.Rather, it represents an
agonized reappraisal of American liberalism by men who seek to take that
liberalism further to the left.These
men seek to assert far more overtly than in the past—and with an intensified
impatience—the socialist and anarchist traditions that have always been an
important, albeit more or less covert, part of American liberalism.Thus, the New Left represents liberalism at
the crossroads.Liberalism is called upon
to decide which of its many components are to predominate in the future.

Probably
the best known of the New Left philosophers is Herbert Marcuse, professor at
the University of California
at San Diego.[1]He advocates a modified Marxism that would
recognize that the proletariat[2] has
been lulled to sleep by the affluence of American society.Since, he says, the workers can no longer be
counted upon to revolt in the classic Marxian sense, the revolution leading to
the ultimate anarchic “classless society” (updated by Marcuse to envision a
computerized utopia) must come from the “social outcasts”: disillusioned
intellectuals, minority races and hippie types.He favors what he calls a “liberating tolerance,” by which he means
tolerance for all views seeking change, repression for all views seeking to
preserve the present society.

Another
prominent author is Noam Chomsky, a leading opponent of the Vietnam War, who
welcomes the “revival of anarchist[3]
thinking in the New Left.”[4]He attacks the liberals who have worked
within established American processes, criticizing them as being too cerebral
and saying that it is rather a powerful emotional response that is needed to
the issues of the day.

It is Saul
Alinsky who best illustrates the degree to which “old socialists” are gaining
an increasing voice today.[5]He has had substantial influence; his
tactical plan and theories are picked up at least in part by such disparate
personalities as Noam Chomsky, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and the late Robert
Kennedy.[6]Alinsky is an advocate of the communal
ownership of property within an anarcho-syndicalist[7]
social organization.With this as his
theoretical foundation, he has devoted his life to forming “organizations of
the people.”His hope is that such
“People’s Organizations” can (1) give a voice, through agitational and coercive
techniques, to those whom he considers the dispossessed in American life, and
(2) serve as the possible basis for a future organization of society.

Michael
Harrington and Christopher Lasch disavow revolutionary violence and call for
the formation of a broad socialist party based on a thoughtful formulation of
socialist theory.[8]Lasch is critical of those in the New Left
who argue that socialist theory can arise only out of revolutionary action.

Theodore
Lowi writes of the “end of liberalism.”[9]He says that what America
has had has been “interest group liberalism.”As a substitute, he offers “juridical democracy,” which would involve
more explicit social planning, more conscious direction. Seeking to streamline liberalism from a
planner’s perspective, he says that the time for pragmatism, for the pulling
and shoving of interest groups, should be over.His philosophy, too, is an attempt to take liberalism farther to the
left.

Although
these authors constitute only a small part of the many who comprise the New
Left, our brief review of their positions has been sufficient to illustrate
some of the alternative approaches they are urging liberalism to adopt.We see that each urges a bolder radicalism.At the same time, there is no consensus among
them as to theory or method.They share
the basic values of the Left, but are still carrying on the internal disputes
that a hundred years ago separated Marx from Lassalle, Fourier from Owen.

If we may
judge from the American experience of the 1930s, we may anticipate that at some
future date there will be a tendency to form a “Popular Front,” a coalition on
the left.Or nineteenth century Russian
history may serve as a guide: one of the formulations may gain sufficient
momentum as to absorb or exclude the others, just as Plekhavov’s Marxism won out
over the competing socialist views among the Russian intelligentsia.I think it is doubtful that the New Left will
long remain in its present fragmented form.

2.It is not enough, however, for us to become
familiar with the variety of New Left ideologies.We must come to understand it in the deeper
sense—philosophical, historical, sociological—to which we have already referred.

Liberals
themselves most often explain the New Left—as, say, the student radicals—as
being idealistic young people who are essentially sound, but who unfortunately
are going too far in their tactics.In
this explanation, radicalism in the universities (and elsewhere) is a healthy
phenomenon, albeit sometimes distasteful or even brutish.

All I can
say in the remainder of this essay will serve as a refutation of that
explanation, which I consider shallow and indulgent.The New Left is not a healthy phenomenon; it
is, rather, an ugly manifestation of the division and failure of consensus that
has plagued western civilization for the past three hundred years.The New Left, or something like it (and the
German youth movement prior to World War I and the Russian nihilist movement were
surprisingly like it), may someday effect the destruction of our civilization
unless constructive forces can successfully overcome such movements, provide
answers to the recurrent problems that have plagued modern society, and create
a sound consensus.

(a)In everyday life, it appears that the world
exists on a settled foundation, that the civilization in which we live rests on
a solid base.But this perspective, as
natural as it may be for the acting man, has never been fully justified
historically.

Thus far,
every civilization has suffered certain fatal weaknesses that have led to its
demise.Rome,
for example, existed for a thousand years.And yet, at no time did it have a foundation that could serve to
perpetuate it for all time as a satisfactory basis for human life.The Republic during the wars with Carthage[10]
was looked upon by later Romans as the ideal time, but it was based on unique
circumstances which were bound to and did change.For six centuries thereafter, Rome
was based on civil war and military dictatorship.

Can anyone
say that the Middle Ages were firmly settled on a satisfactory foundation?(There are those who say so, but most of us
find it difficult to share their judgment.)

For its
part, modern European civilization, including America,
has never settled upon a permanently workable foundation.As to its ultimate values and institutions, a
continuing debate has raged for hundreds of years.What, for example, do we mean by “freedom” or
“equality”?The anarchist gives one
answer, the classical liberal another, the Burkean conservative still another,
and a socialist yet another.What is the
proper role of industrialism, of technology?Again, the socialist and the Burkean, for different reasons, disagree
with the major developments of the Industrial Revolution.What about the bourgeoisie (the middle class)
and its values and life-style?Still no
agreement.What shall be the place of
the intellectual?And what shall be the
proper role of the state?Instead of a
consensus on any of these vitally important subjects, we have had, since long
before the French Revolution, only dissension.

(b)A philosopher who saw a great deal of this
was Jose Ortega y Gasset, a Spaniard.Writing in the early twentieth century, he directly related the rise of
syndicalism, Marxism and fascism to a society that does not understand its own
foundations.[11]Indeed, the type of man that has resulted from
the Industrial Revolution—the “common man”—shows little concern for the
necessary prerequisites of civilized order.Spoiled and shallow, exhibiting the psychological qualities of
impatience and ingratitude so characteristic of a spoiled child, such a man
almost inevitably adheres to “direct action” movements in politics.Such movements, whether they be Sorel’s
syndicalism, Hitler’s Nazism, Lenin’s bolshevism, Marcuse’s revolutionary
socialism, or the Black Panther’s assertion of black superiority, offer a
quick, ready-made solution to people who are spiritually capable of nothing
better.The consequence is that
European, including American, civilization has been in constant crisis.The New Left is simply another manifestation
of that crisis.

(c) To
understand why the New Left arose at this time in its present form, one must
first understand how the dissension we have just mentioned has worked itself
out in American history.

It is a
mistake to consider that the Left simply proposes alternative economic systems
to capitalism.As capitalism arose
during and after the renaissance, it already was developing a strong enemy: the
landed aristocracy.As time passed, it
gained new enemies.The intellectual had
been on top of society during the Middle Ages, Eric Hoffer tells us;[12]now capitalism had displace him, forcing him
to take a secondary position.The
intellectual became intensely alienated from the bourgeoisie: first, because
the bourgeois was his natural rival for prestige and power; second, because the
acting man—the practical man, as opposed to the intellectual—didn’t basically
care about the same things the intellectual has cared about—music, art and the
simple life of contemplation.

But the
intellectual could hardly fight the acting man by himself.He needed allies.And he discovered his primary ally in the
“proletariat,” the workers.Today, he
seeks allies from the minority races and those who, for one reason or another,
wish to discard the life-style of the middle class.

All of this
has been apparent in American history.The intellectual has been nurturing his alienation since the generation
of Emerson and Thoreau in the early nineteenth century.His alienation led, by the beginning of the
twentieth century, to a complete change in predominant philosophy among our
writers, poets and artists.They had
moved from a pro-capitalist philosophy to one that abhorred capitalism.

The acting
man, for his part, has continued to go his own way.Under his impetus, America
has made substantial advances.It has
also retained most of the values that the intellectual dislikes so much.The American middle class, having its own
vitality, has responded only slowly to the intellectual’s criticisms.For a number of years, the intellectual has,
by virtue of the “Roosevelt coalition” consisting of the
intellectual, labor, minority groups and the Solid South, held a position of
political leadership.But still he has
not been able to make the fundamental changes he has desired to make.

Indeed, the
Left has now realized what inevitably it must have come to realize: that a
“welfare state” simply makes more people bourgeois (although not really in a
way that is consistent with bourgeois values, either) and does not constitute a
deep revision of society.The society is
still no more fashioned after the intellectual’s image than it was before.

Thus,
liberalism reaches the crossroads.The
“welfare state” has been a political instrument designed to do certain things,
but the welfare state’s goals have been limited.The liberal is at one and the same time (1)
emboldened by his successes, (2) frustrated by the inertia the society exerts
against further changes the liberal advocates, and (3) aware than only through
a much more radical or revolutionary program can be hope to realize his
ultimate objectives, which are utopian and anti-bourgeois.

The result
is that socialists and anarchists of various kinds have begun to fight over the
remains of liberalism.All of them
express a profound impatience, a very real contempt for America
and its technology.And for the most
part, they do not really care how destructive the radicalism is, unless in any
given case the author’s analysis convinces him that revolution is a poor
methodology for producing the desired result.

But what of
the future?At least one thing is clear:
the agitation of the Left against our institutions and values will certainly
persist.There is no reason to think
that it will abate, since the Left’s ideas have already existed for two or
three centuries and have shown a very real capacity for spurring men on, both in
this country and elsewhere.[Note in 2006: A remarkable thing was
that the New Left’s militancy went into sharp decline just as this article was
published, and so the prediction that it would not abate was contradicted at
least in outward appearance.What happened,
however, was that the alienation assumed different forms.The “culture war” has continued over all
these years, very successfully undermining all of the old values; and the
alliance with “ethnic minorities” has produced an immigration invasion that
threatens the existence of the United States (and of Europe) as we have known
it.]

The
bourgeoisie, now denominated “the silent majority” in the United
States, has never formulated a
philosophical, moral rationale that would provide it a defense against the
alienated intellectual.It has, instead,
just gone on without much of an articulated ideological base.Such a condition may be able to persist for
quite a long while, as it already has.We might, however, expect that ultimately it will spell the demise ofAmerican civilization as we have known
it.[Note in 2006: The philosophy of “individualism” is what I grew up
thinking was the basis for mainstream American values.One aspect of that philosophy has been a
commitment to a market economy.Since
this article was written, the ideology of a market system has been preempted by
a globalist outlook centered on the multinational corporation.This sees great value in seeking the cheapest
possible sources of labor, both by exporting business and jobs to lesser
developed parts of the world and by encouraging many millions of people from
those places to immigrate into the United States,
providing inexpensive labor here. This
is displacing Americans from employment and is hollowing out the American
industrial base.Thus, far from finding a
philosophical position appropriate to its own needs, the American middle class has
seen its own erstwhile ideology coopted for purposes inimical to its
interests.]

Despite all
that I have said with regard to the forces leading to instability in our civilization,
I am not without some optimism.It would
be unpardonable for us to overlook the fact that we are living at the advent of
a new age: the space age.We can have no
conception of the changes that age will produce, although it appears safe to
say that those changes will be vast.A
century from now, the problems of civilization may be very much different from
our present problems, just as we ourselves are no longer concerned with the
issues that existed under feudalism.Perhaps the alignment of forces will be totally different and the
spiritual-intellectual tone of man substantially altered.

The New
Left is a manifestation of the continuing difficulties in our own civilization,
but we may not be trapped permanently with those difficulties.

[Note for further
reading: Several years after this article was published, I included three
chapters about the New Left in my book Liberalism
in Contemporary America (McLean, VA: Council for Social and Economic
Studies, 1987, 1992).See chapters 12,
13 and 14 of that book. The book appears on this collected writings Web site as
B6; i.e., Book 6.]

Endnotes

[1]See particularly Professor Marcuse’s Essay on Liberation and Critique of Pure Tolerance, although his
major work, One-Dimensional Man,
Beacon Press, 1964, is, despite its abstruseness, an important source.

[2]
Throughout this essay I will footnote unfamiliar items on the assumption that
my readers are not necessarily acquainted with them.“Proletariat” refers, in Marx’s language, to
the working masses who do not own the means of production.

[3]An “anarchist” is one who favors the
abolition of all government, although most anarchists favor the existence of
voluntary groups that will hold property in common.Historically, many anarchists have favored violence
as the means of attaining the destruction of the state.

[4]Noam Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins, Pantheon Books, New
York, 1967.

[6]For the attitude of Arthur M. Schlesinger,
Jr.,and his expression of the position
of Robert Kennedy, see Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Crisis of Confidence, Houghton Mifflin Co.,
Boston, 1969.

[7]A “syndicalist” is one who favors the
organization of society on the basis of trade unions, which will run industry
and fulfill whatever functions the state may otherwise have legitimately
performed.Syndicalism was primarily a
French movement, headed by Georges Sorel.It advocated the “general strike” and “direct action” as the means of
attaining such an organization of society.From this, we see that anarchism and syndicalism are similar, with
syndicalism placing more emphasis on unionism while anarchism speaks more
generally about “people’s organizations.”

[8]Michael Harrington, Toward a Democratic Left, Macmillan, New York, 1968; Christopher
Lasch, The Agony of the American Left,
Vintage Books, New York, 1969.